About MyHowTo.ORG

What this site is about? Actually, it is quite hard to answer this question even for me :) Initially, I was inspired by the collection of the documentation called “HOW-TOs” available for Linux since 1995. Around that time I have played with my first Linux installation (I did not have a CD-ROM drive in my i80386-based machine so I had to borrow one from my friend’s company to install Slackware 1.x). At the beginning, everything was difficult and non-obvious. Configuring Sendmail and UUCP to get access to the email was a challenge. These HOW-TOs saved me a lot of time and brain cells. I loved the style of these documents and the fact that they were very well balanced between focusing on the goal (to get something working!) and explaining how do the things work.

I have realized that it may be a good idea to extend this approach to other areas. In my past, I worked part-time as teacher at one of the universities. I enjoyed this time a lot. After that I did a lot of different things, mostly around Linux, Java and related technologies. Several times I was thinking about writing a book about something that I considered very interesting and not very well covered in the documentations (there is always a huge difference between a good book and the product manual). But every time something stopped me from doing this. I still consider that writing a good book, i.e. the one I would like myself, is a very difficult and time-consuming task. Not sure I am ready for it. So, I have finally decided to try different approach - working on the series of relatively short articles about various problems and the solutions for them. Eventually, organizing them in categories and - thanks to the modern search engines - making them available to anyone seeking help with the problem I ever solved myself.

I would summarize my current goals as follows: - Share the experience and the ideas with others - To promote the open source solutions and open-minded approach to the software development - To meet new people, encourage them to contribute to the project and share their knowledge with others - To encourage the new people coming to the IT industry to learn and to do the things right

And, of course, to learn more about the technology - sharing the knowledge is the best way to learn new things

I consider my efforts as my contribution to open-source community which makes the modern computer world such a nice and diversified place.